Thursday, September 21, 2006

I cycled along the coast from Sutton to Dublin. It was dark, around 1am and very windy, but I heard a tune out to sea, though it was so softly sounding and the wind so raw, that I could not sense where it was coming from. Maybe it was coming from Howth, 1500 or so meteres to my left over the sea. Maybe the wind was blowing it over from there from a session on the hillside. After a short while I began to suspect it was not originating from an outside reality, but from the otherworld - sirens out at sea communing, or the first glimpse of a blueprint delineating what score beyond human consciousness my soul is tuned by as it plays in this world.

I was hearing a tune - no doubt about it - and whilst the first two notes where always the same, after they sounded the tune played a few more - very swift notes - and then trailed off beyond the edge of hearing, but kept returning, never playing the same snatch of tune twice.

Once I passed Bull Island I sensed the force disappear and it only came again once more, twenty minutes later as I was moving out of a wind swept Dublin bay and into urban shelter - after I thought the episode had ceased - and I took it as the sigil for me to engage in the act of writing poetry from the source who sung to me in Sutton when wind and dark where one.

~

This is a found poem. I got the text from Sanderson Beck, who is a 59 year old peace activist advocating non-violence and love as humanity's only way. He has been in prison many times for campaigning against war and murder, most recently in 2003 after speaking out on Bush's war. In March 2003 Sanderson was arrested whilst advocating love and peace outside Vandenberg AFB, where they were using computers and the space command system to direct the shock-and-awe attacks on Iraq.

His writings cover the full span of human history and his knowledge is vast. The perfect library in which to learn accurate information focussed and aware of how it all fits together. A real life saint amongst us now, whose life has been nought but promoting goodness and learning of the wider human relevence and spiritual love .

FOUND POEM - SANDERSON BECK

Zenophan said Pythagoras stopped the whipping of a puppy because he

recognised the soul of a friend in metempsychosis

is not a self-proclaimed wise manbut one who pursued wisdom

through friendship. A philosopherwith knowledge of

Egyptian - Chaldean - Magi and their spiritual secrets.

My constitution in the Italian city of Sybaris taught

immortal mystery - understood insouls returning til harmonious peace

is all they construct. That art won number is the universe's law and

unity the law of God.

~

Plato's three component psyche ofappetite, emotion and mind

trace to Pythagoras's wisdom through friendship

(philia means freindship - sophiawisdom)

and a spectator seeking truth has the best role in life's game

~

Diogenes Laertius when put up forsale as a slave - cried for someone

wanting to purchase a master forthemselves and Socrates addressing Pythagoras said

"Don't stir the fire with a knifethe passions and swelling pride of the

great or step over the beam of a balance."

~

Philo heard

"If the soul is diverted from its course it enslaves itself and makes whose soul

it is a slave to a host of masters."

~

Did Diogenes love of goodness transcend his fear of death or think

Euclides colic - Plato a bore, Dionysian performance a peep show for fools and

that the bad - even if prosperous - stilllive badly?

~

Zeno - godfather stoic - taught while pacing back and forth in a collanade

stoa is porch and

"A friend is another I" he said.

~

Senneca was a Quaestor in the reignof Tiberius and Caligula - jealous of

his oratory - tried to kill him, but Claudius banned him instead until he

was recalled from Corsica by EmpressAgrippina - tutored Nero, appointed

Paetor - got rich and counselled

"No matter how many you slay, you can'tkill your successor."

Senneca commited suicide at 65 -believed love and fear do not mix

"live for the other person if we wish tolive for ourselves and no-one can strike

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

TrackmarksLinear stigmata of addictionTomorrow's scar tissue constellationsdisfiguring the body of workPhonetic glyphsof abstract correspondenceTheir outlines traced in bloodShrinking from the spikeor splattering across the pageA ring a ring o' rosiesMoments when the final things are saidExposed in a brutal waterslap of clarityIn the coupling of the sinfuland the divineThere's a fine line to be crossedSequences of discretebut regular consummationinter-penetrating the punctured bodieswith the syrup poisonof transgressive desireWasping decorationsFading in time from someLong lost personal campaignAlong cablestitch fleshLesions where the worldhas entered usThese tender spotsRubbed by unconscious gestureTil they stand chafed and pertPrized in their shameLess they scab overWith our ability to be touchedBehind the scenes of the crazy wardin all cried out lucidityDoubting Doctor ThomasPressing our woundsin the chemical light of analysisThe marking on our skinsThe words we choose to speakThe nettle of awareness we nurseHaphazard paths through the wildernessCreasing the undergrowth with bruised stalksDiscernible only by the spoorof some animal long passedTiny clues to unknowable awarenessPatterned sigils in the drying clayTrackmarks

Monday, September 18, 2006

Dubliner Tim Costelloe and Belfast man Mark Madden are both writers whose live poetry humanly connects with those hearing them speak their work to life as air and in the ear. They are two committed artists in whose lives an ongoing lifelong search for the centre of ourselves is conducted through the act and language of poetry.

~

Untitled

Nowhere to sit to ponder days
no silent loss which time betrays
the flutter and flame inside your
breast is not the same.

Nor can you once more emerge
to greet this eye
beautiful and dumb as any flower
untame
a lie
a hidden power

sulking like distance under lilac skies
between deliberation and an urge
between the living and what dies
in this the crucible of our expiation.

Your prayer the fist which silences me
so that I can't pray or even see a fresh
sun licking rivers in the East

Tim Costelloe

~

Make up your Mind

The lapwing calls across the gorse
The air is sweet as wine
Spring grass is rich and cool
But you’ve made up your mind

Before the senses sweeps a world
Both graceful and sublime
Full of all that was ever real
But you’ve made up your mind

Made it all up from what you were told
God and Country, Space and Time
And the glittering screen of the vacuum tube
Where They make up your mind

And you’ve made up your mind what’s important
And you’ve made up your mind who you are
And you’ve made something of yourself
While your true soul floats in a jar

It’s not the world your reason sees
Dissected and defined
Pressed and flat on blank white sheets
Because you’ve made up your mind

Languid you stifle a vaugue ennui
In the folds of your collapsable chair
When from the garden the twins appear
Darting eyes bright, and sure of their prey

Lucy pleading
And Stacey leading
They pull you up and bear you away.

Mark Madden

~

Betrayal.

More the plural of same
though fissure-points ungrasped
through scan in rubble

Cronos
his splash will peel - reveal
and smudge as much these ruins
toa blur - so seek not black spots

on a pink dress as they flutter in
some foreign breeze - nor the
cocktailed eye's florescent paint
brushing antique lights to a modern
splendour.

Justify no lie roller-balled over
diarying night - have mercy, for one
day I too shall pardon, Lord, these
indiscretions of a savaging time

while raindrops sparkle hair
in mirror, while fork caresses
sausages on plate and hands move
pages

innocent at least if not sublime.

Tim Costelloe

~

Canto IV - The Twins

Finally tiring of their prize
They lead you dazedly back to the house
To where the adults loll around
Flushed from a recent game of croquet
All Pimms, white canvas, bestial grunts
Toothless and puce as long-caged wolves
Awaiting the expected dinner bell
To which of course your asked to stay
BVut Lucy Fretful
And Stacey regretful
Point out that your trousers are on the wrong way
And just disappear.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

There is an old saying here, along the lines that "it's through the shelter of each other we survive..."

...the we

~

heard above on Fodhla, Banbhu and Eiru's shore. Look them up. They're real dealers in a genuine craic factory cum casino. Making it happen on demand in their home where live poetry is living. They come from all nations and have the combined passions of a big apple, Birmingham, Alabama, Clint Frank - saw by KFK "...score four touchdowns in less than two quarters, against a pretty good Princeton team." Playing ball in Boston College. An alumnae of Cardiff dockers at punch up in a pub with Leeds miners

Second year. A lot of hype. Photographer in attendance. 5' 5" tanned and toned 'n with a fella. A fellow photographer, upstairs in the Palace by accident. Lulled in off the street by our night's energy. Arty beyond belief. In Dublin myth happens. This home of dream. Joyce 'n Beckett - Wilde 'n Shaw. Freud said the Irish were un-analysable because life to them was just story, tale and talk. These four Dublin writers nailed spoken word to page with a true ring. Snapped "the passionate and transitory" reality from which we draw for poetry and fictions on the page. Shut the books up and speak our print to live in ear and off the page.

~

Druid Paddy. Dominic Taylor. The White House. Limerick pub hosting weekly poetry Wednesday night. Broadcast in CD quality, online several days later. The world's very first one. Stunned us to silence with only two of his works. One, a love poem to his wife. Humble and honest and a true spirit of Munster. SW Ireland. Rugby. Limerick. Thomond Park - 31 October 1978 - Munster 12 - All Blacks 0. Incineration ground. An event for the plot of John Breen's global smash hit play - Alone it Stands. Humanity as one unbeaten at home in the European cup for well over a decade. Utter fanatics.

Dublin. May 2006 - Lansdowne Road. Munster V Leinster semi-final of the 2006 European Cup. A unique game of Rugby. Immediately fabled into an all time classic. Munster fans sung Low lie the fields of Athenry through electric megaphones. No Shit.

A proud steward and Leinster fan tried to fix a withery stare upon the main Munster man singing into his megaphone, leading a gaggle of war-painted bodran players. 20 in the heart of the hardest of hardcore support. Upper stand V. North end of the East stand. Munster fan's are 110% unaware or caring of the Leinster stewards desire for less enthusiasm at sporting events. Munster's passion seized me and we hollered at full cry. A joy to watch. Munster. Michael Collins. Keano. Play to win.

~

Higgins - O hUgin is a premier name in Bardic literature, particularly in the West. Sligo, Clare, Galway. Kevin Higgins is a class act. Leader of the pack. Total poetry, direct and without apology. Life’s knowing wink of intimacy in immediate connection. One main force for good in Connacht. The wild west of Ireland. Atlantic crashing home after its three thousand mile run. Mayo beating Dublin for the first time in 100 years, at this years All Ireland Football semi final at Croker. 80,000. Sheer mesmeric nature. He does not wilt beneath the flame. The real thing and man for a crisis, with an unflappable poetic sensibility Remember the Artic Monkeys? Beatles? All the cool bands you dreamt of being into at the start?

Nor Ulster man Mark Madden, who has made it happen as a poetry organiser in both Copenhagen and Vancouver. Total commitment to live poetry. Owner of the Arcadia Coffee House Belfast. Have you experienced Gearoid MacLochlainn on fire yet? Mark's red hotness gushes from the same source. Weekly live performance and desire, to horrify straights with sheer talent and total commitment. Forget the idea of poetry being a lonely wandering, on a cloud above an unconnecting audience. Saying how wonderful the entertainmnet was when all were bored shitless. Bluffers beware.

Have a Gander

~

Making it happen. Aint seen nowt like it. His life is write and recite. Now. As we blather. At the Patrick Kavanagh Celebration 2006 on Friday night. Mark swinging from a stair platform at the Palace Bar in Fleet Street Dublin. His posession beneath the glow on our warm inclusive stage, plugged us all in as one mad zapped bunch of pure class poetry lovers. Mark Madden was completely electric, as were many others lashing out art and living poetry to life from 7.00 - 10.30pm.

~

Glenn Gannon. Son of a sixth generation Dublin flower seller climbing Kilamanjaro for charity. Yeah, that’s right. Venturing up a mountain. One man and a dream so insane and positive it was just meant to be. Reading from his award winning autobiographical short story My own Isolde. Just one of the stars who shone there.

Andrew Clark, a flute player working on the front line with bandaged fingers and who sung one of his own ballads, which welded all there in a oneness rarely experienced at most gigs of poesy. No shit.

~

The ballad's central protaganist was Balor - a one-eyed god of myth his eye a laser gun eye, killed by Lugh, who is the sun deity of the Tuatha de Dannan, who came and did the talking here around 1500'ish BC. Vanquished by the Sons of Mil. Milesians. The final wave of mythical invaders to appear and reality as we prove it begun.

~

Terry Cosgrave said he was there as a poet, only in the sense of a Latin American country boasting the most ratio of poets to population on earth, 100%. It's the law that all citizens of the state are poets, until proved otherwise. Like here.

~

Razoring up a throng to enthrallment with his magic, was Mark Granier. Tales and gags in adundance. Sinking bullseye ‘n urban reality with a feline one liner slinkiness and smootherity, all there tittered in as one.

This was raw and amazingly live poetry. We grains containing galaxies of void and light thermaled there last Friday. Spells were cast and launched at the centre darling in lar, so say coz we're all feeling it now my toys. We all whirled away in mythic contemplation of how life's blueprint letters in the roll. Rock me not to torpor, for I am at home in a space station orbiting earth. Now. At this mo - so stop, in the name of love. What more in the nameless surrender of we folk and tiddlers, toddlers and teasers weakening a bond with the local community watch tower concentrating energies and monitoring what moves.

~

We gave a serious account of ourselves. I was at the door ushering in gob-smacked normal people, unable almost to believe reality beckoning from our stage.

The crammed venue physically forced a spotlight of corner to occur. A speakers corner of full inclusion. This is why the night was a success. Because all were treated equally. Everyone got their moment in a spotlight, however humble they be. PJ Brady made sure of that. PJ played Kavanagh for twenty years in a one man show. Played him on his hundreth birthday in the church at Innnerskeen, Monaghan. Cavan man Patrick Brady from a few miles down the road - playing Patrick Kavanagh on his centenary day, just yards from the grave.

The Heart Laid Bare was the play. The monologue culled from Kavanagah's own poetry and prose. A reconstruction. As close to the horses mouth as can be. Kavanagh came onstage that night, and on Friday. PJ

"Are there any here who have not spoken and wish to do so? Please come, share from the stage. This is what the event is all about. To show reality. Give a platform to the dis-possessed. Folk who feel and love. All of us."

~

Poetry happened.

~

The butterfly and hawk eye of logic wrestled accident. WB dropping muffin forks, tea cosies and a goldfish bowl upon the floor of Lissadel in summer. Window open and a giraffe shaped tree draping its branches either side of the two doors. Like a tucked swan-wing.

Patrick Finnegan, like Kevin and Rita Higgins, a superb Galway poet, but unlike them, not in the first flush of manhood - with a fair few knocks along his way, but still a legend for those lucky enough to hear his work. He sounded a mesmerising poem and gifted his huge live talent to give all there a fair jolt. Literally in gasp at Paddy.

Come fly with me. Bring an apple flower scented with a Du Luc full bottle region, where we spent a winter wrapped in one another's arms. The whirlwind approaching did not ruffle us. Curled coiled critical of only the cold and uninviting tenderness of a seven day holiday and work-break in Bayside.

~

We had harpist Brenda Molloy and mandolin legend Sean Og dipping in and out of the mix with the perfect timing of one whose life is nought but sound. Music, poetry and song in the Palace, whisked to life and literature by poesy's vibe and Kavanagah's spirit alone

~

Under the tunnel sheltering from a whirlwind.No doubt it will happen one day if you come again my sweetest of Scottsboro roses, scenting Alabama in white cotten. It may well be much cooler when you touch down this time. Fleece are needed. A warm jacket, hat and gloves to fully prepare for what happens in the day.

God of speech Anthony Cronin joined with literate deity Derek Mahon in a prime piece of church property (built in two years at a cost of £5000 and opened for worship on Sunday 14 June 1863).

To make John Betjeman speak on Monday evening? I hear you say?

Off coursethose dividing iambics which tick bombs of opinion to explode on-screen in various free-of-all-verse forums throughout cyberworld,

were given an hour long airing;fifteen minutes after I arrived on foot and realised my destination was a compact walk-up prayer-hall on the SW corner of Stephen’s Green, and outside whose doors a trail of suits assembling in obvious number, witnessed a man unseen for some months in such ratio.

~

When Cronin comes to work it's a full house of gossip lovers who relish the real thing,

and Deggsy’s global reputation mixed with Tony’s gags meant many came early to guarantee a spot at the lock-in.

~

Both A list repositories of their nation's poetic lore;

one of whom staggered ducked and dived round Dublin,London and Paris with literary legends in the first swill

of his manhood, 20 years before many seniorwarblers were anonymous newbies learning to ropepoet's at the Palace Bar.

~

A frisson of potential exclusion briefly fused through the thickening queue of punters on the pavement below the large gothic stone portal with doors designed to withstand a battering-ram,

due to abruptly shut when evening prayer began,so I thanked creation for guiding me to exit my flop hutch of composition 10 minutes quicker than when non-gods appear in more quotidian and emptier space.

~

A liminal flux was palpable during the 30 seconds in the go-slow bottle-neck I mistook for a dash to basement seats

and breathing a sigh of relief as I left the patient and orderly autograph mad punters entering their names in a visitors book

peeled off from the queue to a stagewhere Ogma's word moved through two who connect

with the last rites of Greg's beatification at the gobs of Chris and Mick in the Surgeons,

as so many so desperate to attend a readingI'd not witnessed since then

John Betejeman- massively popular poet and hack's ghostemanating an odour of iambic ectoplasm I whiffed when a plural god kicked off behind a pillar blocking my view.

The perfect position to leave with no fuss, should boredem call or a need for the jacks.

~

Cronin is an icon whose fantastically long poetical pedigree and orbits are unique, varied and have accessed all ear and tongue from Taoiseach to tramp. On a generational scale Seamus is to Anthony as Cronin to Betjeman.

But whereas John B’s gift -of/mak/ing/verse-cause/un/ease- is underrated by those who do not work in this form and can not write in regular iambic for toffee, Tone C's prose equivalent ability is conjuring up cut-glass barbs oficewindy intellectuals blow in fear of

a talented cypher cutting their quill.

~

Cronin and Mahon are not legends in the first flush of youth like Aisle 16 or the thick crop of bruisers on net-boards new talent writes on, so vive voce was never a backable odd in a religious space built for a few hundred.

On an international stage Dek's poems are read and Tone by comparison is unknown; but his influence here is instantly audible for all who witness this remarkably real-life conduit offering poetical insight for all; whoever they are and however they write

and although he got lost in a line or three, his sound of sheer sincerity and acceptance when collapsing mid-stumble served to convey only extra layers of vocal poignancy on a day whose celebratory depth of meaning filtered through loud-speakers to even the most cynical of butt-parkers crammed on the pews avid and rapt listening for myth being lured to life from seven pm.

This hot bed of tolerance was a congregation of all ages, from geriatrics down; there for a service from two maestros speaking John’s word at a temple,whose art I heard Ogma invoke in an hour long enconium.

~

Just hearing them both blowing breath was instruction enough; and with Tone in arch-poet mode to a faster younger understudy doing it straight

John Betjeman spoke to me through Mahon and Cronin, the octogenarian colleague whose speech god gifts a laboriously acquired form few write in